In today's wireless communications world, mobility is a large factor. With the ever increasing speed of wireless connections, mobility requires fast host route convergence, in the order of few milliseconds. Whenever a host moves from one switch to another switch in the network, in order to continue to keep host connections, whether they be established voice calls or data Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections, and minimize traffic loss to the host, the network needs to have the latest consistent reachability information about the host as quickly as possible in order to keep the network outages limited.
The routing convergence domain size is limited due to sheer number of messages propagated by the switches when each host/device in the network moves form one switch to another. The flooding of the route update messages sent throughout the entire network utilizes more bandwidth, and consumes processing cycles of the network, thus limiting the number of devices on the network domain. However, not every switch in the network needs to be notified of each individual movement of a host device. Each switch only needs to be notified if a host device movement will cause a change in its own data path, thus, there is much possible room for optimization compared to today's traditional wired and wireless networks.